The Stanford School of Medicine is studying cases of people infected with COVID-19 to determine if the patients are co-infected with other respiratory viruses.
The study is being led by Ian Brown, MD, who is a Clinical Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine.
The preliminary analysis shows that 1 in 5 people that have the COVID-19 virus are also infected with other respiratory viruses. The study also shows that around 1 in 10 people that exhibit symptoms of respiratory illness when visiting emergency rooms and are diagnosed with common respiratory viruses are also co-infected with the COVID-19 virus. So diagnosing a patient with a different respiratory virus doesn’t rule out COVID-19 infection too.
Nigam Shah, MBBS, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Data Science at the medical school, points out this is different than what experts originally thought:
Currently, if a patient tests positive for a different respiratory virus, we believe that they don’t have COVID-19. However, given the co-infection rates we’ve observed in this sample, that is an incorrect assumption.
The team said that it is important to understand that co-infections do indeed exist, and the accurate and rapid testing for SARS-CoV-2 is necessary to identify who is infected, to help slow down the spread of the disease.
For the study, Brown and his colleagues looked at 562 patients from the Marc and Laura Andreessen Emergency Department, which is part of the Stanford Health Care Facility. 49 out of the 562 COVID-19 tested patients, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.
They also ran tests looking for other common respiratory viruses, such as influenza A and B, pneumonia, and other respiratory viruses. Out of 517 tests, 127 people showed positive results for one of the other illnesses.
Brown stressed the importance of these tests because currently, many hospitals are not testing:
Hospitals don’t have unlimited access to COVID testing. In some cases, a patient with respiratory symptoms may first be tested for a non-COVID virus. If there is a diagnosis of influenza or rhinovirus or other respiratory virus, a hospital may discharge the patient without COVID testing, concluding that the alternative diagnosis is the reason for the symptoms.
The Stanford tests showed that when people were tested for both SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses, 22 percent of the confirmed COVID-19 cases and 8.7 percent of the other respiratory ailments were co-infected with both kinds of viruses.
